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Higher education institutions have evolved into a more stressful environment. Women have been experiencing higher levels of stress than their male counterparts. With higher education adopting to the onset of the pandemic, this brief report studied women's perceived stress in relation to perceived organizational and supervisory support, and age during times of crisis. In an era of social distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns, the findings suggest that women's perceived stress is negatively related to age, perceived organizational support, and perceived supervisory support. Society as we once knew it pre-pandemic will never be the same. Higher education is inevitably going to have to manage the aftermath, a new normal that can only be as effective as the employees that help keep the organization running. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While race and ethnicity have been analyzed often in the recent literature on the national foreclosure crisis, there has been little focus on gender and marital status in studies that focus on seriously delinquent mortgages. Merging data sets from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Census, we examined differences in the proportion of mortgages that are seriously delinquent at the Census tract level in the Philadelphia Metropolitan Division by gender and marital status. We found that Census tracts with a high proportion of single female borrowers have relatively high proportions of seriously delinquent mortgages, controlling for many other factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

National surveys and a survey conducted by the authors in March and April 2004 revealed that the public’s concerns about air, water and land pollution have declined during the last four years in the United States and more specifically in the State of New Jersey. In New Jersey pollution remains a major concern of most residents, even during a period of a war, anxiety about terrorism and the economy. Those most anxious about pollution do not believe that government is doing enough to protect the environment, want to maintain current environmental laws, and are worried about the future. Disproportionately they are African and White Americans, middle income, and college graduates, in other words, part of the American mainstream. Direct attempts to weaken environmental protection are likely to be resisted by this core of the population, which does not trust current federal, state and local governments to protect the environment. We expect concerns for the environment to continue and yet change as production processes in the United States continue a trend toward pollution prevention, and we wait for the public’s mental models to catch up with this evolving reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2005, we surveyed 650 homeowners in Middlesex County, NJ, to determine the relative importance of property taxes, crime, physical decay, and other negative factors in resident-declared decisions to leave their homes and neighborhoods. We also asked about positive attributes and inertial forces that keep people in their neighborhoods. Respondents most often cited high property taxes as the factor that would "very likely" cause them to leave. Fourteen percent said they would leave for this reason versus 4 percent because of "motor vehicle noise and heavy traffic"--the second most frequently mentioned factor. Notably, those likely to leave because of property taxes were disproportionately 45 to 64 years old, were college graduates and relatively affluent, and had no children living at home. They rated their neighborhoods as high quality, but did not depend on local services. We consider policy options for retaining this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Residential Security Maps produced under the aegis of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) are often regarded as significant evidence that the federal government was complicit in expanding segregated housing patterns. This paper suggests a different direction for the analysis of the agency's role and the impact of their maps regarding patterns of real estate appraisal and mortgage credit allocations. It is argued that: (1) whereas the broadly asserted relationship between race and residential security areas can be demonstrated, there are important variations that should drive further research in this sphere, including the significance of other demographic, socioeconomic, and housing variables; (2) despite uniform guidelines, the appraisal surveys and assignments of grades by HOLC were not identical across cities; (3) the approaches utilized by HOLC were not identical to those implemented by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), making it unlikely these agencies had a cooperative relationship; and (4) the relationship between grades and the distribution of mortgages varied by lender type and between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, suggesting the importance of local context in examining HOLC as a public policy instrument and its subsequent impact on racial segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The appraisal practices of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and its Residential Security Maps are often cited as major contributors to later redlining and the perpetuation of segregation through unequal access to mortgage credit. This article focuses on whether there was a relationship between the HOLC's neighborhood assessments and mortgage outcomes. Our results indicate that the agency was clearly instrumental in restructuring the home finance system and permitting far greater access to homeowner‐ship, but it is important to consider other factors in examining the HOLC's legacy in the reshaping of the mortgage market and the operation of the financial sector after the Great Depression. Specifically, the issue of increasing segregation in older cities in the late 20th century remains inextricably linked to both the shifting nature of real estate finance after the HOLC era and the demographic, economic, and residential changes affecting U.S. cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]